The Voice of Choice

When I first started teaching high school, I taught 2 sections of ninth grade interdisciplinary English and 3 sections of SUPA English, which was a twelfth grade college level course through Syracuse University.  Over the summer before my first year teaching, I went to Syracuse for two weeks to get trained to teach their program.  If any of you ever get the opportunity to teach these courses, I highly recommend doing so.  The first semester was a writing course, and the second semester was an English literature course that included critical perspectives.  These courses changed my life as a writer and as a teacher.

One of the highlights of the course for me was the opportunity for student choice in all of the writing assignments.  This, I felt, was the real deal.  This is what writing should be for students—innovative, original, and self-directed.  It is really what writing should be for all of us.  While each unit was centered around teaching different styles of writing—analysis, argument, discourse analysis, and research writing—the paper topics were completely up to the students.  I was excited.  However, when the school year began, my students were not.

            I learned quickly that my students needed guidance when picking their topics.  Prior to my course, they had never (or rarely) been given the opportunity to decide their own paper topics.  Furthermore, they had often been given formulas or templates to work from during the writing process.  The first three weeks of class were challenging for my students and for me.  It took me some time to realize that I needed to take the training wheels off of the bike and hold on to the back of the bike for a time while my students learned how to ride on their own.  To help students adjust, I provided numerous models of what students had done in the past.  I brainstormed with students and provided them with research and writing strategies that might help them find their topics and their own formulas for writing.  The entire time, I continued to stress that my rubrics were designed to be open to student originality.  By the third paper, my students became very self-sufficient in the new style of writing and grew to appreciate the choices given to them.  Just like Barry Gilmore states in “Is It Done Yet?”  my students did “come to take more pride in and ownership of the entire essay-writing experience” (13).  As a result, the essays and papers written by my students were inspirational, creative, and relevant.  It is with this SUPA method in mind that I now design most of my writing assignments for 7-12 and college students.  Choice allows for ownership and power to reign supreme.  It allows my students’ voices to be heard over the voices of the texts that they analyze and use in their research.